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Craig - I dont know the specific drive but guess its a 3.5" type rather than a 2.5"?...I think its that specific drive...its certainly needs a bit more consideration than just cost and capacity...there are some quite big differences between them for what seems such a simple device what with the actual drives themselves, cooling fans which are to be avoided like the plague.........I read (sad I know) and tried a few...the WD drives I can honestly say are whisper quiet and never had a problem...the seagate 2.5 drives are now 750GB for decent money in theory should be quieter...I've got a 2.5" 500GB drive and its fine......all this assuming its in the listening area...?

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Thanks for the excellent write up.

My headless Mac Mini running Snow Leopard doesn't require a permanent mouse connection. It restarts fine without any peripherals connected. It also manages to wake from sleep via wi-fi from an iTouch or screen share from a MacBook. I was always told WOL (Wake on Lan) was impossible over wi-fi!!

Nice post, I currently run a Gen 1 ATV as a server with xHDD but a mini will be on the books if it ever dies. You may want to add USB connection to DAC as an option, there are quite a few external DAC's onthe market that will take a USB input from a MAC or PC.

I am not sure if it is the iPad I am using or the article itself but there appears to be some text corruption makes reading he post a touch difficult.

Or is there better? Or am I being paranoid? I was thinking of ripping in third party software, such as x-lossless, and dropping the files into iTunes?

If I rip in itunes AIFF, am I chained to itunes forever? If so, what's the way around this?

Many questions that 10 hours on the net have not answered. Many thanks and best regards, Lee

I'd say XLD and MAX are the best rippers for the Mac

Ripping to AIFF is absolutely fine. The whole point of all the lossless codecs is you can transcode between them with no loss of quality. So if for some reason you want to change you can use batch based tools to do so. If you are sticking with the MAc, I would personally rip to ALAC, it's half the size of AIFF, the same quality and will cost you a lot less £ in disk space.

“We had an audiophile living on our street, until his house accidentally burned down.”

So rip cd's with XLD for more accurate rip quality and then drag and drop into ITUNES?

This would leave me with 2 copies, just what I want.

EDIT: having spent a good few hours trying to work out what all the options are and trying to get XLD to work correctly, I have decided that XLD is not for me. As I can see it, XLD checks a database to see if the cd has been ripped properly, leaving you to source a better copy if your original is screwed. If your original is screwed, you liked it like that in the first place. Also, I can only get XLD to save tracks from different albums in one long list, not what I need for archive. Looks like its iTunes for me.
Good luck if you decide to use XLD. For some it could be useful. Not for me.